Covering a randomly selected song every day for a year, between my 39th and 40th birthdays.
FOR GREAT JUSTICE!

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Tuesday, March 8, 2011

355. "Shadow Cabinet" by The Church

Yeah, I'm doing a lot of things for the last time, and it seems like there would have to be one last massively Fall-centric cover before 39-40 shuts down. Most of the backing track for this cover is built out of Fall-sound-- specifically a bunch of re-pitched samples of "Dr. Buck's Letter"-- and the creepy-factor of the original Church song (which is considerable) is enhanced with little snatches of "Spectre Vs. Rector". For all that, and the way the track sort of sounds like it's delivered at half-time (although it isn't), it's actually pretty faithful to the original. The feel is a bit heavier, but the guitars and vocals are doing pretty much what they always did. Halfway through it, I thought it was going to be fail miserably, but in the end it turned out fine.

I also must have set some kind of turnaround record for sampling by using the drum part from Dolph's cover of "Carnt Sleep" a scant four days after he delivered it to me. And there's another Saint Etienne crossover in the form of a loop from the somewhat obscure (but completely classic) SE track "Filthy" that drives the bridge along.

There's one more experiment at play here: this track is designed to flow directly into the next track on both 39-40 and the Remote Luxury cover album, so the hard cut at the end is intentional. If you're burning either collection to a CDR, there should be no gap between today's track and tomorrow's. That's my general protocol for all of my recordings anyway; this just happens to be the first time I've actually designed the tracks to rely on it.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

As embodied pretty much by Rex and a bunch of samples as detailed above